Mark Zuckerberg Introduces Facebook Bona Fide for $8/Month

Facebook is committed to helping immigrants form connections in the United States.

Here at Facebook, our mission is to bring the world closer together. We care deeply about each and every one of our now two billion (!) users, which is why we’re so excited to announce Facebook Bona Fide,a premium Facebook service that allows users in Syria, Libya, Sudan, Yemen, Iran, and Somalia to form “bona fide” connections to Facebook users in the United States.

There is perhaps no connection more bona fide than a Facebook friendship, and so we wanted to provide a service that codifies this. After all, “bona fide” comes from “bona,” the Latin word for “good” and “fide,” an acronym that stands for Facebook Is Doing Excellent. And we believe in doing excellent by doing good, and in doing so, we are helping immigrants form connections within the United States.

For just $8/month, Facebook Bona Fide will allow users in the six banned countries to make up to 12 Bona Fide friend requests each month to users in the US. For each friend request, you’ll get anywhere from 1 to 49 notifications when the friend request is approved. You’ll get an additional 32 notifications that day for unrelated reasons. We will then send a notification to the Facebook page of the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services letting them know you’ve been verified as having a Bona Fide connection to the US.

From there, they may or may not approve your request to enter the country. Facebook is not liable for requests that are denied. We understand that you might be disappointed by the outcome, so we’ve provided a number of non-like reactions such as “anger” and “annoyance” that your Facebook friends can use on your status about your application’s rejection.

At Facebook, we’ve always been committed to giving our users their money’s worth, which has been proven true again and again by our free product. With your Bona Fide membership, you are also eligible to receive a reunion video every year on the day that you first applied to enter the United States. This will be a compilation of images of you, screenshots of emails you have received from immigration officials in the US, and images of your beautiful but war-torn home country. We believe that these videos serve as a wonderful way to commemorate big moments in your life, such as having your application to enter the United States rejected.

At Facebook, we tell our team to move fast and break things. This includes laws. And so we want to encourage you to break the laws as well; if your Facebook Bona Fide friend request is not held up as an authentic connection to the US, come here anyway. What’s the worst that can happen? Nothing bad has ever happened to me.